


Smoke to a Fire

by MayAChance



Series: A Planet at the Edge of Understanding [2]
Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Ares III - Freeform, Ares IV, Ares Program, Astronauts, Gen, Geographical Isolation, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Mental Health Issues, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Isolation, Mars, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of current events from the perspective of a character in the future, NASA, Near Death, Near Death Experiences, Rewrite of Previous Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26310373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayAChance/pseuds/MayAChance
Summary: I voice my thoughts out loud. “Watney should be dead. The storm should have killed him, and if not, the blood loss.” I’d found a large puncture wound in his abdomen. “It’s a miracle he didn’t puncture an organ in that fall. It’s a miracle he didn’t break anything important. It’s a miracle he woke quickly enough to avoid suffocation. And that was only the first day. Every day after that is another miracle, except exponentially miraculous the longer he went on. He should be dead.”“But he isn’t.”“But he isn’t.”-A rewrite of chapter 1 of A Planet at the Edge of Understanding.
Series: A Planet at the Edge of Understanding [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1911673
Comments: 11
Kudos: 49





	Smoke to a Fire

**Author's Note:**

> SleeplessApricot commented on A Planet at the Edge of Understanding this morning, and it was just such a nice comment that it made me want to reread what I had written. That made me think of a second draft I'd done of part of chapter 1. That made me think, "To hell with it! Writing five thousand words in one day, here I come!" So, enjoy?

I have this nightmare from time to time. Not anything concrete, anything replicable. It's more of a feeling, crushing down on my chest. My heart trembles within me, and I’m filled with this all-consuming horror. It makes me think of horror movies.

I remember watching the Shining with my family as a kid. Our dog couldn’t deal with it - she panted the whole way through, not in reaction to the music or visuals or words, but in reaction to the, not a soundtrack, I don’t know what to call it. The pitch of the noise used in place of music. I knew enough about the movie to know how it would end, and yet I was terrified. I think I might have screamed along with the characters.

My nightmare is like watching the Shining - a slow build, nothing more than a feeling.

This is like my nightmare.

* * *

It starts as a tickle at the back of my neck, an itch that I can’t scratch. Literally - space suits do that to you.

That’s what I thought it was - an itch. Oh how wrong I could have been.

We are Ares IV. And there are six of us, as with every Ares Mission before us, so that means that there are eighteen people before us to have walked on Mars prior to us - which is pretty awesome, when you think about it. I am the twenty-third person to have walked on the planet Mars. It’s incredible.

There are things you think you’ll never have the chance to do, that maybe no one will ever have the chance to do. When I was a kid, no one had ever walked on Mars. It was a pipe dream, something for a distant future. We had bigger problems to deal with, back on Earth. Climate change, rising water levels, poverty, police brutality. The one we all  _ really  _ noticed - pandemic.

I remember what it was like to be alive in 2020. I still get tense when someone walks within six feet of me, I’ll probably get tense like that for the rest of my life. It’s all cleared out right now, but I’ve got a giant freezer in my basement, and I keep enough frozen food in there to keep me going for weeks at the very least. The closet in the spare room is devoted solely to canned foods.

When I graduated, we did it over a video call. Four hours of names read off a list, a flash of a capped head, and a round of polite clapping. I didn’t think I’d be an astronaut, I wasn’t even sure I’d get to go to university! Attend, maybe, but  _ go _ there and be on campus and make new friends and  _ be a college student _ ? Not for another year at least.

I remember writing this haiku after the last day of school:

_ Anticlimactic-- _ _  
_ _ The word for every ending. _ _  
_ _ For this one, moreso. _

It didn’t really feel like we’d finished anything,

That must have been how Ares III felt, after evacuation, but with an additional dishing of:

_ Look here, look! What is- _ _  
_ _ -this emptiness within my- _ _  
_ _ -heart, body, and soul. _

In hindsight, social distancing was a good prep for being an astronaut.

When they first started planning for Ares, there was one thing that they forgot about - being alone in space with only five other people is really, really bad for you. Especially the bit where you’re in space for months on end with little contact with the regular world.

Ares I, a complete and utter bust in all the areas it was intended to study, turned out to be a treasure trove of information on the effects of long term space travel on the human psyche. As it turns out, there’s this delusion that astronauts suffer from- being able to open a door and go for a walk is so ingrained into our brains that, after significant periods of time, some astronauts start to believe that they can go outside. As it turns out, this effect is only heightened by longer periods of time in space.

Karl Tucker tried to take a suitless space walk.

Nowadays, Karl Tucker would never get up to space in the first place - NASA has gotten a whole lot better at predicting how people will react to the isolation that is outer space.

There’s this training exercise. I hated it, but I passed, and now I’m on Mars. That’s what really matters.

They put you in a room, all alone, and then they leave you there. You exercise, read your training manuals, conduct experiments. All in this little room with no one to talk to. It sucks, but you turn on some music or a TV show in the background, and you get through it. You get through it, and you get to go to Mars.

The number of things that could go wrong on any mission are astronomically high.

I won’t go into details but, well, when you’re halfway between Earth and Mars, the only safety net you get is the one you brought with you. There’s no hope of rescue, no possibility. If the oxygenator and all it’s backups go, well. You better hope you’re close enough to Earth on the return voyage before the O2 runs out. And if not, you do your math: is there enough for one person? Two people? Without the rest burning oxygen?

Ares I knew that going to Mars might kill them (it got damn close to getting Tucker).

Ares II knew that risk even better (thanks Tucker).

Ares III? They embodied that risk, and suffered the consequences.

Mark Watney is dead. Poor fucker. But, well. He knew the risks. With every precaution taken, it still wasn’t enough. That storm was the biggest recorded on Mars in the past twenty years. For it to hit while they were there was already astronomically unlikely. For it to hit where they were, that likelihood multiplied by itself. It’s shit but then, things are just shit sometimes, and you have to learn to deal with them.

Horus I failed back in 2023. It was a throwback to the Space Race. People died then, but we kept on sending them up. We take our precautions, and we keep going.

* * *

Rick Martinez from Ares III did a great job putting our MAV down. Wind conditions had been suboptimal, and yet he got it within twenty-five metres of the intended site. Spectacular. Might have been better if he hadn’t, though, considering where the rest of our stuff ended up.

We can see the MAV from the Hab, but only just. It’s far enough away that, with the dust kicking up under a light breeze, we can’t quite see it. Like looking for a city from three kilometres away on a hazy day, or better yet, one with wildfires burning.

I look at it, and I feel that tingle at the back of my neck. Something isn’t right, it says, something is not right.

There might be no wildfires on Mars, but there’s still smoke to a fire.

Spencers get one of the rovers booted up and we go for a drive. “Pilot gets to drive,” he tells me, and I couldn’t care less. 

The MAV is just over a kilometre away, fifteen minutes on foot or a few by rover. NASA likes it when we’re prepared for anything at any time, so we need to get it set up and running now so that we can get the hell off this planet at a moment’s notice. We need to flip the right switches so that it gets oxygen production going, and we need to pull out it’s radioactive battery pack and bury it somewhere far away.

But something isn’t right.

“You see that?” I say, squinting at the MAV’s base. “It’s too wide.”

Spencers doesn’t so much as look at me, which is a good choice. The Schiaparelli Crater does not make a smooth driving surface, so we bounce with larger rocks, which Spencers is trying to avoid.

“Can’t see shit from this far. Give it a minute.”

I console myself: whatever’s up with the MAV’s base hasn’t impacted its functionality in the slightest. It’s still running, still in perfect working order, if reports are to be believed. Given the consistency, they are.

Or, well, there was that one message weeks ago, but… that was weeks ago. A simple reboot and everything has been just right ever since.

_ It was nothing _ , I think.

A minute later, Spencers goes, “Base is wide.”

“Fuck is that,” I agree with a nod. It’s blocky, not a rockslide, but… a single large boulder? No, too shiny. Rocks aren’t shiny.

As we get closer, it gets easier to see through the dust in the air. Too blocky to even be a rock. This is a manmade structure. “Are we  _ missing _ any of our shipments?” The answer is a resounding nope, but we radio back to check in anyways.

“Ey Blair?” I say into my comms, cutting through the background chatter. “Do we have all shipments accounted for, yonder?”

He’s pretty good at translating my words into normal-person-talk.

“All accounted for,” our commander confirms. “Why?”

“Abnormal shape at the base of the MAV - doesn’t look close enough to affect it, we’ll update you once we’re closer.”

“Copy.”

We get there and oh fuck. Oh holy mother of all fucks.

Spencers repeats this sentiment aloud, and Holland is immediately there with a question echoing in our ears.

“Is it aliens?” She demands. “Conspiracy theorists had it right - we shoulda come armed.”

It reminds me of this comic I saw as a kid - an astronaut, saying “moon’s haunted” as they step back inside. “Moon’s haunted,” more like Mars is fucking haunted. Literally. There’s a ghost here. And that makes me think of something else I drew - the open door of a moon lander, with ghosts spilling out of it, desperate to get away from the crowded confines of Earth.

Spencers cuts the engine and we both dawn our helmets, exit the rover, and we stare. What else would we do?

“Oh shit,” he says. Oh shit indeed.

Because that’s no funky rock or boulder, that’s something made by intelligent life and more than that, it’s something that I recognize. I just got out of one. Admittedly, one less dust covered and less decrepit. But the one I just got out of is younger, miles younger. Four years younger.

“What is it?” Blair demands, his voice cold and heavy, echoing through my helmet.

“It’s a rover,” I hear myself say aloud. “Two rovers, attached. Blair, it’s a fucking rover.”

Above us, the MAV stretched into the sky like the towering remains of an ancient castle.

From this close, I can see that they’re covered in Martian dust, untouched over a significant period of time. Reaching one hand upwards, I brush off a patch of the dust to reveal the letters underneath: Ares III. My eyes flicker towards Spencers, and I meet his gaze for a mere few seconds before he speaks.

“It’s from Ares III.”

What do you even do with that information? It’s from Ares III. Great. But  _ what do I do with that _ . Spencers’ words echo through my head, endless, turning over and over in my brain. There’s only two logical conclusions: one, Mars is haunted and the ghost drove the rovers here; two, Mark Watney is alive. Or was, recently enough to have brought the rovers here.

Mark Watney is alive.

In high school, I had a teacher with an old record player in her room - she used to play records while we worked, and every once in a while, we’d come across a broken record. The same words repeated over and over again.

That’s what my brain is like now. An echo, except that the words don’t fade.

_ Mark Watney is alive. _

But… his bio monitor showed no pulse or brain activity, and his suit breached. That’s a pretty strong statement to make. You don’t come back from that, not when you’re on Mars.

Assume the bio monitor was just malfunctioning.

Mark Watney couldn’t have survived more than a minute of decompression. Unless the hole was patched, then it would have been only a partial decompression. Impossible, of course; Watney was thrown out of sight - that’s a hard fall, no matter how many Gs we’re looking at. He’d have been unconscious, if not certainly dead.

And unconscious men don’t patch their suits.

Guardian angel? Says my brain. Shut up brain.

Not a guardian angel. Science: my brain continues down that path. If blood had seeped into the gap, the liquid would have immediately evaporated in the atmosphere leaving behind only residue. Depending on the size of the wound, it was possible for the decompression to have been stopped: but that didn’t change the bio monitor.

It pronounced that Mark Watney was dead, an indisputable read on his vitals.

Malfunctions happen.

Only one way to find out. “Preparing to enter MAV,” I report, and I turn to inspect the MAV. “The ladder is already in position.” It’s retractable, you have to press a button to get the ladder.

Nothing else to do: I climb up.

Spencers joins me in the airlock after a moment.

But when we go to climb up to the control room, we’re stopped. The airlock beeps at us. “Equalization required,” it says. So we equalize, Spencers reporting the development back to Blair and the rest. For an absurd second, I consider what they’re doing. They probably think we’re having them on. Well, they’ll be in for a shock.

My suit beeps at me. “Commander, we’re reading a breathable atmosphere in here - 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% other.”

The lights are on, I note dimly. How long have the lights been on?

By now, my heart is pounding, an impossible, heavy thump against my chest. There’s a flash of movement in the corner of my eye, and like any good character in a horror movie, I grab at Spencers’ hand and clutch it tight. “Did you see that,” I hiss, and he’s shaking his head, and then I see it again.

“There,” I point with a trembling hand, and when he sees it, his hand tightens over mine, constricting as tightly as my ribs feel over my chest.

On the other end, Blair is losing his cool. I can almost hear him hyperventilating over the comms, and if that wasn’t enough, he’s repeating, “See what?” Spencers hushes him as we circle towards the movement on slow feet. As we’re about to see what’s in the chair, it makes a noise, a low groan that echoes through the enclosed space. It’s a pathetic noise, like the mewling of a tiny kitten except  _ this is a spaceship on an uninhabitable planet _ .  _ There are no kittens _ .

“What the hell are you seeing?!” Blair practically yells into my ear, but I ignore that.

The chair is occupied. Not with a what, but with a who. He’s tall, probably, certainly taller than I am, though that’s no high bar. But despite this, he can’t weight much more than I do - his clothes hang off his frame. Not just clothes, though, the remains of an EVA suit. Pale wisps of hair cling to his skull, and he wears a shaggy beard. There’s a faded American flag on the shoulder facing us, and I know in my heart that the bio monitor malfunctioned.

Because this is no dead body. Mark Watney is breathing.

“Take your helmet off,” I order Spencers, reaching up with shaking hands to remove mine. “We don’t want to startle him.” Some traitorous part of my mind whispers  _ not that he could do any damage _ .

“Startle who?” Blair says, and he’s getting annoyed. Rightfully so, but I don’t have the time to deal with that right now.

“It’s Watney,” Spencers says distantly. “He’s in the MAV.”

Blair does something reasonable. He doesn’t believe us. And fair enough - I wouldn’t believe us either. No amount of truth combats healthy skepticism and a lack of evidence. Plus Spencers is a known prankster. “Never in all my years have I heard such a cruel joke,” he snaps. Fury trembles in every word.

In his position, I’d be angry too.

I ignore him.

There’s nothing I can say, nothing I can do, that would convince him to think otherwise. In the meantime, I have a patient to attend to.

I kneel next to Watney’s chosen chair, rest a hand on his arm.

“Watney,” I say once I’ve turned my mic off. “Watney, can you hear me?” I shake his arm, gently. It’s far too thin beneath my hands.

“Go away,” he mutters, tugging vaguely at his own arm. When I don’t let go, his eyes blink open.

He screams.

I scream.

Spencers, evidently the only cool head amongst the lot of us, does not scream.

“I think he can hear you,” he says, an amused tone covering any deeper emotion. He then addresses Watney, whose hazed eyes have latched onto him. “Isaac Spencers. Gotta say, I am both very surprised and  _ very  _ honoured to meet you!”

Whatever’s going on in Watney’s head as he glances between us cannot be good.

Look. I’m no expert in psychology. I did the bare minimum amount of psychology you can get away with at med school. I’m a capable field medic and surgeon, not a shrink.

Even then, I know that Watney’s look out is not bright.

There’s a reason that solitary confinement is illegal in most countries. It’s been shown to cause anxiety, depression and even hallucinations. That’s for a time period of only a few months.

Watney hasn’t seen anyone else in  _ years _ .

Without a doubt, it should have killed him. There would be an initial onset of depression - his crew left him behind, and even if they thought he was dead, that leaves a mark. Followed immediately by hopelessness. And while Watney must have made the choice to keep going - at least initially - that hopelessness wouldn’t have gone away. He’d have no way of knowing if we were even coming. Everything he did could so easily have been for nothing, made so in an instant or over a terrible series of days as he ran out of oxygen or water. That would lead to anxiety. Then somewhere along the line would have been hallucinations. Watney should have starved to death or his equipment should have broken. Something. If Mars didn’t kill him, then it’s a miracle that he didn’t kill himself.

“You’re not here,” he says.

Perhaps blessedly, he passes out.

I exchange a look with Spencers. “Holy shit,” he whispers. “Holy fucking shit. What the fuck?”

My thoughts exactly. “See if he’s got a helmet around. No, nevermind. This suit is busted to hell, we can’t move him in it. Grab one of the extra EVA suits. I’ll report back to Blair.” He nods, and I switch my comm back on.

Blair shut up a minute ago, leaving the channel silent and cold. I dread switching my mic back on, but do it anyways. “Mark Watney is alive and in the MAV. He passed out a moment ago - Spencers and I are going to get him into one of the extra EVA suits and bring him back to the Hab. Should be there in fifteen or twenty minutes. We’ll keep you updated.”

I start disassembling his suit - easier said than done. After a minute or two, Spencers is back to help me. It takes us ten minutes to wrangle his unconscious body into the suit.

Getting him down the ladder is more a controlled drop than anything else, made possible only by Watney’s decreased weight and the low gravity of Mars.

Blair greets us at the Hab, stone-faced and furious. “Never in all my years!” He snaps as I slip out of the rover. I can imagine what he means to say next, but I cut him off before he can continue.

“Respectfully, I really do not give a shit. Help us before you judge us.”

Our commander mutters his way over, followed closely by Holland, Reed, and Nate.

Spencers wrangles the unconscious Watney out, passes him over to me. He hops down, and we both sling his arms over our shoulders. “Nate, grab him for me.” Our systems operator and PR chief had six inches on me with ease, a far more suited build to lugging around the six-foot Watney than I had.

“Do we have the med supplies set up yet?”

For once in his life, Sebastian Blair has nothing to say. He shakes his head in a slack-jawed silence.

“Is it inside, at least?”

Indeed it is.

A real assessment will have to wait for when he’s conscious, able to tell us what hurts and what doesn’t. For the time being, I’ll have to content myself with a basic visual assessment. He’s too skinny, not in the way of a picky five year old, but in the way of someone who hasn’t seen a full meal in years. He’s bruised most everywhere, but none of his bones seem to be broken. He’s not in immediate danger of dying, and for now, that’s all I can ask for.

We rearrange the bunks to give him a place to sleep.

An hour into my vigil, Blair taps my shoulder. “I should have had more faith in you. I’m sorry.”

I shrug and scoot over so that he can sit beside me. “It’s okay. I’d not have believed me either.”

“Still. You’re part of my crew, and you deserve my faith.” He exhales a shaky breath. “I just sent a message off to NASA.”

Eek. That cannot have been fun. “ _ Heeey _ NASA,” I parody aloud. “Remember that dead astronaut? Yeah, well, he’s not fucking dead.”

It gets a snort out of Blair at the very least. “Something of the sort,” he agrees.

I try to imagine, for a moment, writing that message. There can’t be much more awkward in the world. Then I try to imagine  _ receiving _ that message. There can’t be much more confusing in the world.

No, wait. Being Watney must be a hell of a lot more confusing.

I voice my thoughts out loud. “He should be dead. The storm should have killed him, and if not, the blood loss.” I’d found a large puncture wound in his abdomen. “It’s a miracle he didn’t puncture an organ in that fall. It’s a miracle he didn’t break anything important. It’s a miracle he woke quickly enough to avoid suffocation. And that was only the first day. Every day after that is another miracle, except exponentially miraculous the longer he went on. He should be dead.”

“But he isn’t.”

“But he isn’t.”

“Think you can keep him that way?”

I blow out a breath. “There are two main things we need to contend with. One, his immunity. We’ve got bugs he doesn’t, and his immune system is shot to hell. I think we can get him through that alright. The second is him. He’s been holding out for rescue for four years, but those years are going to have had a significant toll on his mental health. He probably thinks that rescue is the end of his suffering. It isn’t. When he realizes that…” I let my words trail off. Blair knows what I mean.

“You reckon he’s got another miracle in him?”

“I think we’ll have to wait and see.”

Something occurs to me. “The bacteria he’s got on him must be fascinating. I mean, maybe not to me, but for a biologist? Hot damn.”

“Shame we didn’t bring one.”

As such, it’s one scientific discovery that will elude us. By the time we get back to Earth, the bacteria on Watney will have mingled with ours enough to be of less scientific value. Although… “Has anyone opened up the rovers yet?”

Blair shakes his head. “Good idea. We can get samples out of there tomorrow.”

Across the Hab, Spencers looks up from nudging the microwave into working order. “I cannot wait to see how he got those rovers running,” he calls. “He must have brought the water reclaimer and the oxygenator. Actually, the oxygenator totally should have taken up all his battery. I wonder how he got around that. What sort of samples do you think he brought with him?”

“Rocks,” Reed says decisively. “No better samples exist - easy to store, unlikely to get ruined, also pretty.”

She’s probably right about that.

Blair nudges me with one elbow. “You’ve done what you can for now. You should take a nap. We’ll wake you if he gets up before you do.”

Sounds as good of an idea as any.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested in the "Mark survives but has to wait until Ares IV" format, then I'd recommend reading Close to Home by Glowstick.


End file.
